A few years ago I used to regularly post about Ovid’s resource of the month. I always thought it was a good way to test drive a new/different database and it was nice to know that it was available (free for that month) just in case I got an odd search question that could be answered using it. However, things changed a little bit and Ovid began profiling certain journals as resources of the month. I can understand how a company wants to drive interest to their other products, but I was more interested in the databases not the journals. As a result I had decided to stop posting about the resources of the month.
Yesterday while checking my news feeds and updates I noticed that Ovid’s December Resource of the Month is EMBASE Classic and I just couldn’t pass up chance to let other medical librarians know about the opportunity to search another medical database for free.
If you are looking for old research articles, and have already done an exhaustive search in MEDLINE, you might want to check out EMBASE Classic. It indexes biomedical research articles from 1947-1973, 90% of which have abstracts. The information covers over 3000 journal source titles.
Try it now for free in December at Ovid
Learn more about EMBASE Classic from Ovid
I will continue to watch for future Resources of the Month and if there are databases listed that might be of interest to medical and health librarians I will post about them. Depending on what is profiled it may not be every month, but as I mentioned earlier, I cannot watch a good medical database go unused when it is available for free (even if for a limited time).